The drive toward Meaningful Use and meeting the government mandated measures has ushered in a new sense of urgency for practices to get the most out of their EMR/EHR software. However, with the HHS cracking down on enforcement, it has become more critical than ever to understand the differences between three closely related measures:
- Core Measure 12 of 15
- Core Measure 13 of 15
- Menu Set Measure 5 of 10
With much confusion among these three measures, we’re happy to provide a straight-to-the point summary of them…in Layman’s Terms!
Core Measure 12 of 15
This Meaningful Use Core Measure is all about providing patients with an electronic copy of their health information upon request. Like ALL measures, how your EMR is certified for this measure and how your EMR tracks this measure is how you are going to want to interpret the measure and the objective and alter your workflow accordingly. Remember, meeting the meaningful use measure and meeting the needs of your patient are NOT the same thing. Also, meeting the needs of your practice and meeting the measures are NOT the same thing.
Example…most EMR’s have a “start” and “stop” action that represent the denominator (Start) and the numerator (Stop). If you have a request from a patient for an electronic copy (which is NOT happening in great quantity across the country) and you perform the Start/Stop action as defined by your EMR, you will meet or exceed the objective and the measure. In our experience, we’ve seen many EMR software products interpret this measure to produce the minimally defined data. Meaning, the “Stop”/Numerator is calculated by producing a CCD/CCR type result that is both Human Readable and structured data that can be used in Measure 14. However, many times this does NOT factor in scanned data that will most likely contain information that your patient is desiring. So remember, focus your efforts on meeting this Meaningful Use Measure and your efforts on meeting the needs of your patients and spend NO effort on attempting to combine these two efforts!
Core Measure 13 of 15
Core Measure 13 of 15 is about providing patients with clinical summaries for each of their office visits. Often, this measure is met when providers manually print out the patient’s visit summary and hand it to them at the conclusion of each visit. This Meaningful Use measure can also be met electronically with the EMR patient portal, where the patient can view and download a PDF of their visit. Again, this is all dependent on how your EMR tracks and interprets this measure. Be sure you fully understand how this data is captured and tracked in the EMR to ensure that you hitting the objectives and meeting the measure.
Menu Set Measure 5 of 10
The nice thing about this item is that it is optional. Practices only have to meet five of the ten Menu Set items, so they can choose to make this measure one of those or not. This menu item is about providing patients with timely electronic access to their health information. This measure differs in that it doesn’t have anything to do with information you actually deliver to patients or reporting a patient action (like the previous two we just discussed), but rather about your practice and EMR pushing information to make it available should your patient want it.
To help your practice provide the most up-to-date information to patients, ScanSTAT can help you with your patient record scanning efforts so critical information is available when needed. To learn more about these measures in-depth, download our latest white paper: “Medical Records and Meaningful Use.” ScanSTAT provides services to work with your EMR of choice to help you meet these Meaningful Use Core Measures. Contact us today to learn how we integrate our services with your EMR technology platform to help you fulfill Meaningful Use.